Erick Swenson

For Texas artist Erick Swenson’s West Coast debut, the Hammer will exhibit an untitled sculpture of a young deer scraping the tender velvet from his antlers onto a resin cast of a large Oriental carpet. Using digital technology to scan the original carpet and an inkjet billboard printer, Swenson has painted the design and color onto the polyurethane resin cast. The room-size installation offers us a haunting juxtaposition of object and creature, both displaced from their original identities and place. Swenson’s Hammer Project exemplifies his sculptures of fantastic creatures caught in surreal situations. These works, startling in their originality and humor, are the result of his lifelong obsession with dioramas, prosthetics, stage sets, and special effects.

Organized by James Elaine, curator of Hammer Projects. Hammer Projects are made possible, in part, with support from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Special thanks to the Cooper Family Foundation for the loan of Untitled, 2001.

Biography Erick Swenson was born in 1972 in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas. He received his B.F.A. from the University of North Texas, Denton, and has exhibited in Texas and New York, as well as internationally. Recently he has had exhibitions at Angstrom Gallery, Dallas; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Kunstraum München, Munich; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. He was included in the New Orleans Triennial at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2001) and in Out of the Ordinary: New Art from Texas at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2000). This Hammer Project is Swenson's first exhibition on the West Coast.

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Erick Swenson
Kurator: James Elaine